121112-a-solid-idea-for-helping-new-players-overcome-challenging-mechanics
Content | |} ---- ---- Oh please. The reason that those guides are abandoned is not because the players are spending too much time complaining. It is because they quit! They decided to spend their money elsewhere. Hopefully when things pick up new people will choose to make guides for those who want/need/like them. | |} ---- ---- How you get from "Hit me up in game. I'll explain every fight to it's last detail..." to "Learning to recognize these patterns is what makes PvE content fun" is beyond me. I agree that learning the patterns is fun, but everyone who gets stuck along the way should not need to "hit you up in game". The Caretaker could provide the exact same advice you do. He could even do it in successively detailed steps with each additional wipe in the same place. As long as there's an option in the system menu somewhere to voluntarily "disable post-wipe Caretaker hints" for people who do want to struggle through it, I think this is a great idea. | |} ---- No game in the history of forever tells you how to beat it, why would an MMO that boasts about its inherent difficulty be the one exception in the history of forever? Me telling you what happens and you experiencing it are to vastly different things. | |} ---- ---- Because it's the only MMO I know of that has interesting mechanics in leveling dungeons. What does it matter if the info comes from the caretaker or another player? And yes, there are plenty of games that give you hints about what you are supposed to be doing. For me, the fun in the leveling dungeons is in the execution more than the "figuring it out". OK, actually I really, really enjoyed figuring it out when the game was fresh- but it's a different time now and the people who enjoy that stuff have mostly already done it. If it can be turned off, I see no reason to not tell people the general idea of what they are supposed to be doing in an entry level dungeon. | |} ---- We are not supposed to agree on stuff Yasfan . . . | |} ---- WoW has a built in dungeon journal since 2011 that explains each encounter. They added that because practically everyone has been using addons (DBM and BW) to explain every encounter since the very beginning of WoW's existence. | |} ---- Inorite? Madness! Madness, I say! :blink: | |} ---- ---- And that's why no one really is able to appreciate WoW's content anymore, because it's simply a checkbox on the way to a reward. WildStar's reward is not just the loot, but figuring out what's going on AND performing though it with a team. | |} ---- Who would've thought that I, Eclips, would be the great bringerer of togetherness for the active general discussion posters. I've been noticing a trend lately.... As far as the discussion goes-- people like to figure things out on their own, but they also like to complete content. I can only speak for myself really, but if I'm not with a guild and group of players that I'm familiar with / want to do competitive progression content with, I could care less about figuring out the dungeon. I only have limited playtime, and if most of it is consumed by figuring out a dungeon that isn't really self explanatory--- well it's pretty frustrating. You can gate dungeons by gear, speed, and whether or not you die in it etc. Gating something because it's hard to figure out is something you reserve for world firsts etc in raids. Things that people should be doing every day like vet dungeons? Meh. Just let me do it because it's part of my content gate (attunement), or its the best way to cap elder gems, etc. | |} ---- I doubt very many people are having that kind of fun with the leveling dungeons anymore- I agree it was fun right after launch when everyone was figuring this stuff out, but now people don't have the patience. I think most runs are successful when you have an experienced player in the group- and at that point no one's figuring anything out- it's just being explained by the experienced player. Of course, I can admit there's value to the experienced player doing the explanation- it adds an element of teamwork and a feeling of working together. But of course, this could still be achieved by the player explaining before the first wipe. And if a pre-made group really wants to figure things out (like my guild would have done at launch) you could just turn the option off. Anyway, I don't disagree with you completely, but my feeling right now is that more explanations for leveling dungeons (not vets) would allow more people to experience the dungeons without toning down the most fun parts (the execution). | |} ---- I'm actually on board with this idea (or something similar), and I'll tell you why. We ran Skullcano today. It's a dungeon I ran a lot, and I love it, but I've always ever been DPS. You know how that goes, you go in, you do what you're told, everything works out. I went in with a bunch of players, sort of a mix of new people (my wife's first Skullcano) to veterans. However, I was tanking on a Stalker, something I'm still new at. I expected people to die; that happens. I explained the fight in all the detail I knew it in. Stay out of the little red telegraphs when they drop, kill the totems, and the intricacies of the feeding frenzy phase. We died more than I thought, because a debuff was coming from somewhere and I didn't know where. In fact, multiple people were getting it. Savvy leaders would know this is because people weren't dodging the rain of fire, and eventually I did figure it out and explained that we REALLY needed to avoid the raining fire. I never even thought about it. However, the only resource we have for that is to look into the combat log, often full of a million bits of information we don't need compared to the relevant things we do. It took a while for me to finally see someone get nailed by one of the rain droplets and start taking the debuff. From there, teaching was easy. That's an issue that a system like this could address. Not even just a warm-up, but a post-death tutorial. At the very least, it would be very useful, if not to just the new player, but to whomever is teaching them, to know what killed them and why. Now, this doesn't necessarily help on bosses like the Bosun, where you might be told you died because of exploding squirg, but the reason you died was actually that you couldn't run through the ink wall in front of you. I'm not sure if there should be (or really can be, considering the myriad ways these things can be done) an instruction that says, "If you get the dripping ink debuff, run it to the outside and run clockwise." So there are limitations to this and any system. Siege of Tempest Refuge can't really tell you the way to allocate your soldiers or spread out, those kinds of tactics are up to the players to develop. But if we expect players to teach players (and we should), it would help to give them the tools they need. Even people who have played the game since launch, or even beta, don't always know everything about every role in every fight in every instance. Something as simple as, "When Stew-Shaman Tugga calls down his Rain of Fire, avoid the area it will land! You don't want to burn up, do you?" Even if it's not clear to the player himself what that means, at the very least, a knowledgeable player would know what the rain of fire is. Or, we might spend all kinds of time explaining the knockback mechanic of Stormtalon and his whirlwind phase, but we might just assume players know to avoid the random lightning bolts that will follow them. How can we be sure they know the telegraphs follow them and they just have to keep moving? Hell, it might also help to get a breakdown of each fight rather than a combat log, talking about the percentage of times a mechanic misses compared to the percentage of times it is launched. That way, a quick glance might tell you if a member or members of your team are eating an otherwise simple mechanic you weren't thinking about. It might also be extremely helpful if everyone is new, since it would list the attacks going out and who is dying to what. Even a party full of completely new players could get through Stormtalon if they open up a little menu that tells them they're taking too much damage from X ability, and there's a little icon allowing them to see what X ability does. That way, a new player can click "Dripping Ink Phase" and see that people are taking a lot of damage from "Newborn Squirgling", then click on a question mark icon next to it. That could bring up the tooltip that says, "During this phase, Bosun will throw Newborn Squirglings, who will follow players. If you don't kill them quickly enough, they will explode!" A veteran player going for a medal run with other veteran players, though, might glance at the mechanic if he isn't already aware of what happened, if not just immediately close the box. He doesn't need to see tooltips or lists of abilities. The only challenge would be making sure it's an obvious enough system that a new player can find and navigate it easily (it's completely useless as a teaching tool for them if they don't even know where it is, so it might be best to default to opening automatically upon resurrection, or even death if we want to give people time to read about the mechanics while they're facefirst in the ocean of blue). Otherwise, veteran players could find it completely ignorable. It isn't like this removes the difficulty from the game at all; 90% of the difficulty of an encounter isn't in knowing what the abilities do, it's the execution of avoiding them. Knowing that Aethros has an attack that punts you back, makes you run through tornadoes, and interrupt him is only a small portion of the mechanical knowledge. The difficult part is learning to run through those tornadoes without taking too much damage, to sprint and dash through telegraphs, and to save your interrupt for just that very moment. It doesn't remove the fun at all from a difficult encounter to know exactly what an ability is doing, but it might make it a lot less frustrating for new players, especially ones that don't have an encyclopedia of a teacher to help them. It would surely make it less frustrating for the teachers to have some way of easily seeing what happened to their students that didn't involve parsing information in the combat log. | |} ---- ---- I thought we were getting veteran shiphands because we like to do shiphands sometimes, and it's nice to have them at level 50. You might be invalidating the Protostar Academy, though. | |} ---- What about those of us for whom veteran dungeons are likely going to be the pinnacle of our endgame? Those of us who enjoy challenge but may not have schedules amenable to raiding anymore? But no, so long as the raiders can cap their EGs quick, it doesn't matter. Then again, if you're doing dungeons every day, wouldn't you have figured them out by now? Thus the whole "having to figure it out" thing is no longer a problem... | |} ---- ---- ---- You could turn it off, or potentially this idea could apply to leveling dungeons only (not what Eclips wants- but there could be an argument for only doing this where newer players are likely to encounter the fights), or maybe even just STL 20 and KV 20. | |} ---- Maybe it's an issue of teaching. My new players usually get mechanics like Aethros and Stormtalon right. Then again, I usually go over, very quickly, what an interrupt and a breakout are. The problem tends to be the little things I take for granted (so maybe I don't explain them well enough). There's a certain level of telegraph, Bosun's Scab diving, Stormtalon's normal lightning, the Forgemaster's molten rain, that I figure are pretty self-explainatory. Get out of the red stuff before the telegraph fills up; it's pretty basic. Well, not really basic. That's normally where the new players get lost in the shuffle. They spend a lot of time listening to me talk about the important phases and things like Tugga's rain of fire just get lost in the shuffle. I mean, the feeding frenzy is the most important mechanic to teach, and the DPS need to know to burn the totems down, but the "don't stand in the bunch of little telegraphs that show up" kind of seems like small potatoes, even though it's just as lethal if two or three people eat it at once and the healer can't keep up. If it would be nice to have one thing taught to all players before they even hit level 20, it's footwork. A lot of people come into the game not knowing how to sidestep, circle, or dash, and it's kind of hard to teach someone basic footwork in a dungeon on top of it all. Forgemaster's bullethell mechanic is fairly straightforward to someone who knows how to sidestep and watch what's coming, it's downright murderous to someone who's been manually turning and running to their left or right to get out of a mechanic. That's to say nothing about how long people drop DPS to avoid telegraphs that come in series. I've got a couple places with dummies set up on the Shadowcaster to teach it, and I'm sure you could use dummies in Thayd, but hopefully those mechanics are taught in the upcoming training dungeon. Movement is the one thing you have got to know how to do before walking into a level 20 dungeon. It's not too hard to explain the Aethros punt mechanic to a brand new warrior (make sure kick is on your bar, don't hit it at all in the fight until that phase, and not until you've run right up next to Aethros). Everyone seems to get that the first time through with me, if they know enough about sprinting and dashing to even make it to Aethros in the first place. | |} ---- ---- ---- Actually I was thinking that this guy would be the perfect NPC to deliver the tips. I guess they could re-name him to Eclips...? | |} ----